Kerri & Stefan

There are weddings and then there are WEDDINGS and this massive party at Trinity Buoy Wharf definitely falls into the second category. From start to finish it's clear that everyone is having a ball, Kerri's smile doesn't leave her face for the whole day! Exactly as it should be. With a large number of guests and lots of logistics involved, including boat travel, a fabulous wedding coordinator was needed - Always Andri was the perfect woman for the job. The day ran without a hitch and looked utterly beautiful too. Let's get started shall we? There's lots to enjoy...

{Watch The Film}

Our Wedding

Kerri The Bride: We really wanted to balance two things for our wedding...keeping certain traditional Greek Cypriot elements to keep our two Grandmas happy (they are both in their 90s!), while trying to give many of our guests a slightly different experience they would remember. So we wanted a very untraditional traditional Greek wedding!

The Theme

We really wanted to make all our guests feel special. So our theme aimed to revolve around them (which was no easy feat given that we had 300 guests!) This began on our invitations which played on the theme of ‘Us and You'...We chose a selection of wedding related words containing the letter ‘U’ and wrote them without the ‘U’. We then had an overlaid transparent sheet with the ‘U’s to complete the words, and finished this with the line ‘Our wedding...it wouldn’t be the same without U’. We tried to continue this theme on our website, the Order of Service, and with personalised table plans and place settings (see below for more details)!

The Ceremony

The wedding ceremony was at All Saints Greek Orthodox church in Camden, London, one of the oldest Greek Churches in the UK. We tried our best to explain the idiosyncrasies of the Greek ceremony in the Order of Service (like the bride and groom swapping rings, doing laps around the altar and exchanging crowns linked together with ribbon). To thank everyone for their patience, we finished the ceremony by giving each person a bag of pretzels (to stop them getting peckish on the way to the venue) attached to a bag of confetti...meaning A LOT of confetti was thrown!

The Reception

With the ceremony over, we had a red bus (filled with bottles of Prosecco, of course!) pick us up and take us to the Thames, where we got on a boat for a trip up and down the river. The Diamond Boys, our roaming band, wandered about the boat playing songs to the guests. Two of our ushers, each with an usherette tray filled with business cards, walked around giving them out. This was in place of a traditional table plan. Each business card had a guest’s name on, a personalised ‘job title’ (or funny description) for each guest, and where they were sitting for dinner. Once off the boat, all guests made their way inside the old lighthouse building of Trinity Buoy Wharf. We wanted to bring the outdoors inside, and our incredible florist Floribunda Rose did exactly that...with huge trees lining the walkway, arrangements of greenery filling the arches, and seasonal flowers covering the tables. A huge, beautiful cake accompanied a hand-made wooden lighthouse gift box in the corner. The hand-calligraphied place settings were envelopes. And inside each envelope was a handful of fake money with that specific guest’s face printed on it (in place of the Queen’s). These would be used later to be pinned on us as we danced the traditional Greek ‘money dance’, and doubled up as our guest book with a space on the back for people to write a message on.

The Food

Also on the tables was a wooden trough filled with ‘soil’ and vegetables, that was actually everyone’s starter...called Dig For Dinner. This came complete with a shovel to serve the delicious vegetable mousses covered in the crumbled walnut ‘soil’. To continue with the casual vibe, all our meals were sharing platters...including things like BBQ'd bavette steak, halloumi kebabs and heritage tomato salad for main. And things like truffles and homemade mint aero for desert. The sharing platters were great, as they really got people talking, and kept the energy up!

The Entertainment

The band kicked off the dancing, with live versions of garage classics. We then moved on to Greek dancing (the groomsmen had Greek dancing lessons before the wedding!), and the money dance...a Greek Cypriot tradition where guests would normally pin their gifts of money to the couple as they danced their first dance. In our case, it was the personalised money / guest book that was pinned to us. The fathers also played their part. The groom’s dad got on stage to play the drums with the band, while the bride’s dad, famous for tying his tie around his head at weddings, had ties handed out so that everyone could also get in on the act. Later on in the evening a huge donut wall was brought out, as well as Croque Monsieurs, for people to snack on.

The Photography & Videography

Our incredible photographers Paul Joseph were there with us from moment one, guiding us around and making us feel more comfortable. While our videographers, This Modern Revelry, managed to go almost unnoticed, and still managed to create the most fantastic video!